Reaching for the Sun
by iandyourghost
Summary: Broken things scattered on the ground glittering like fallen stars. Rampant Tower of God introspection ahoy.
1. I

**Disclaimer: **not mine.

**A/N**: No one knows the depths of my sorrow that ToG does not have the adoration, the _following_ it deserves, the first couple chapters are the deepest and saddest sh** I've ever seen from a manga/manhwa. Expect more drabbles and introspection because- _Koon, Baam._

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"These people," Koon mutters to Baam in disgust, pressed in close shoulder-to-shoulder in a teetering rickshaw, "they're fools, all of them."

"Why do you say that, Mr Koon?" Baam asks. His eyes are the same color and depth as the buildings around them, sand golden and dry, sun-baked cobblestone, deep and gleaming, the very tips of his nose and his ears sunburnt a delicate pink, his neck and the hollow of his throat dashed with freckles, his lips chapped.

Koon has to pause for a moment, but continues, looking out the window at the clear desert sky, "because they don't know they're living in the tower. They think the sun they see is real; they'll live and die in this cage and never know."

"It's still very nice here, isn't it, Mr Koon?" Baam cocks his head to the side, and smiles a little, yellow eyes radiating real, gentle heat, warm as the false sun rising westward. "Maybe they're just happy to have light."

"Simpleton," Koon scoffs, but it's a biteless insult, and if he sets his hand back down very close to Baam's fingers, and if the motion of the rickshaw presses their knees together, no one was the wiser.

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FIN


	2. II

**A/N**: I need to stop, this is _not_ my history project.

**Disclaimer**: not mine, dashed off in half an hour with the guilt of procrastination looming on my soul.

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It was raining, and Androssi was feeling bad-tempered; rain always managed to do that. Being trapped in a dingy hotel room with an equally hurt Anak while nursing a broken arm, the first major injury in years, didn't help very much either. Her head was throbbing from a particularly vicious kick, and she scrubbed ill-temperedly at her hair, sure she could still smell the mud in it.

"Would you stop that," she snapped at Anak, who was seated by the window, thumping her tail impatiently on the windowsill. "Why can't you stay still?"

"They're outside taking the test _without us_, is why I can't stay still."

"Your griping isn't going to fix us! Besides, neither of us would have been injured if someone didn't decide to abandon her post."

"I left it because I thought you fell!" Here Anak turns, two spots of dark purple high on each cheek, her teeth visibly gritted. Androssi sits up, too, and Anak marches over to stare each other down, the bed low enough so they're eye-to-eye when Anak rises up on her toes, her knees bent, weight shifting every so slightly as if preparing to leap into a brawl.

"Well obviously I didn't, so you botched the game for nothing, Lizard Skin."

"It's common etiquette for you to thank someone when they save your _life_, Miss Ghosty Eyeball. Didn't your parents teach you manners?"

Androssi flinches before she can stop herself. "...No. My parents didn't teach me anything."

Anak snorts. "Figures." But all the fight had evaporated when she saw that flinch, and she lowers herself down to her heels again. The hotel was outfitted in a paltry attempt at emulating a country feel; the roof styled in a ridiculous faux-log cabin affair that swelled with water and leaked at random intervals, the bedsheets and carpet heavy with saturated colors that seemed to suck up whatever light there was. "Scoot over."

Androssi does, and they both flop on her bed, staring up at the wet roof and the elaborate, garishly designed light fixture throwing off watery light, even the shadows pale and wan. It's silent for a very long moment, just the sound of Anak's breathing, her thin chest rising and falling slowly.

"What...were your parents like?" Androssi asks, before she can stop herself.

With the way Anak carries herself, ramrod straight and prideful, it's easy to forget how little she is; she barely reaches up to Androssi's chest when they're toe-to-toe. Her knees sticking out from under her over-sized dress are skinny and bruised dashed with little cuts, her toes are stubby and unpainted, still a child's legs growing into a new body, nothing like a warrior or an avenger.

"My parents... fought, all the time, but they made up every time, too." Anak fists the sheets in one tiny palm, cheek pressed to the bed, Androssi feels like she could fit her in the palm of one hand, how small she looked. "That's what you do when you love someone. You forgive them."

"Well," Androssi sniffs, "it's not like I would know."

"Guess not." Outside the rain crescendos, beating upon the window panes mournfully. It had been raining the day her parents left too, and she had been hungry as she always was, curled up under the stairwell with her blanket over her head, counting the dark whorls in the wood, humming to herself to drown out the incessant thunder, waiting and waiting.

"...But I know now. So."

"...Yeah." The storm wasn't forecasted to clear up for another four days, and the roof was cultivating a suspicious dark spot in one corner, and Androssi's hair was still wet and marshy, but her head didn't hurt as much anymore. She lets herself close her eyes, breathes in the gentle smell of March rain, the last of the season before winter broke and spring came back at last.

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	3. III

**A/N**: Evidently I only have three writing settings: purple prose, incomprehensible crap, or incomprehensible purple prose...

**Disclaimer:** Since Koon is apparently _dead_ you know that I don't have any ownership/control over _ToG_.

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They are sprawled on the floor of his bedroom, exhausted after early morning training. Light was just beginning to peak over the horizon (_"damn cross-dressing kimono-freak and her predawn training sessions"_), strange and vibrant tinted rosy and orange, the clouds blooming red flowers draped across the sky. Nothing like the dawn from his childhood, which was always colorless and sterile, vaguely fluorescent.

Rak was the only one really awake, aggravatingly vigorous, stretching energetically in the corner nearly concussing Skip with his tail. Everyone else wilted slightly with exhaustion, like plants beginning to dehydrate (_"my hair_," Androssi wails from the other corner, nursing her mangled curls in one shaking hand).

Baam is propped up against the bed where Koon is sprawled. He watches as Baam's head droops lower on his chest. The vulnerable little curls of dark hair at the nape of his neck, skin clean and milky the same shade as the whitewashed walls of the Koon manor, and Koon remembers suddenly, mornings at the estate, the slant of the dawn angling in through the slats in the blinds, arching across the floor and crawling back up the other wall, liquid and clear, translucent like Mediterranean waters. A smell like salt and summer rolling through with the receding ocean fog, the cleanliness of an early morning unsullied by heat or human noise, the dreams and nightmares of the past dissipating with the sharp, sweet sound of dawn birds; Koon wonders at the feel of it, the swell within himself of longing for something he'd thought long forgotten.

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	4. IV

**A/N:** I tried

**Disclaimer: **nope

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The cross-dressing freak of a test administrator had, out of either crazed sadism or crazed guilt, handed out candy to them after the latest test- citing something about Positive Stimulation and Enjoy it While You Can in that understatedly creepy way of his/her's.

They were cheap, dime-a-dozen sweets wrapped in bright cellophane the kind kids traded in school hallways especially during Valentine's Day, tied to daisies snuck into backpacks and notebooks and pasted to crudely drawn cut-out cards. Just a step above conversation hearts and one below actual chocolate in the pre-pubescent romantic hierarchy. Koon wasn't planning on touching the stuff with a ten-foot pole, and had neatly disposed of it before they even left the room, but Baam still hadn't caught on to the whole You Against the World thing and had guilelessly popped it into his mouth.

"You know you're probably gonna die, right?" Koon asks, making it a point to sidestep a little farther in case whatever was going to happen to Baam was contagious.

Baam just smiles, possibly already gone deaf or dumb, flashing pink teeth. The very center of his lips and the corners of his mouth are stained a rich, sticky red. His voice is slightly garbled by the candy in his mouth but Koon can hear the humor in it."It's fine, because I know you'll save me."

It was amazingly childish, the way he stuck his tongue out to lick his lips, raised his hand to run his thumb across his teeth a completely nonsexual gesture, the vulnerable seam of his mouth oddly tender. Just a kid who still wipes his mouth with the corner of his sleeve and shuffles his feet when he stands still for too long, and Koon couldn't not reward that smile, so he steps forward, catches Baam with one foot, leans in before he can stop himself.

Baam's eyes are wide, but his mouth is relaxed. His lips taste as sticky as they feel, and he opens his teeth obligingly. The inside of his mouth is syrupy and thick, the kind that will feel tacky in about an hour but for now slides smooth and heady, blood-warm, like swallowing a mouthful of honey, and Koon presses his tongue gently against his tongue before pulling back.

Cherry, probably, a bright tart tang, something surprisingly pleasant about the way the taste of it settles on his mouth. He runs his thumb across his teeth, a repeat of Baam's gesture just a few minutes ago, and Baam blinks back at him dazedly.

_Well_, Koon muses, maybe or maybe not hiding a smile behind his palm, as Baam's brain finally catches up to them and he flushes an endearing shade of red,_ if the candy really is poisoned, at least we'll go down together._

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	5. V

**A/N: **Arkraptor back-story, because S.I.U. isn't bringing it fast enough, and I've been reading McCarthy and have become sort of obsessed with selfish father-son (daughter, close enough) dynamics.

**Disclaimer: **Nope.

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They've ended up God knows where, somewhere rank and dirty that doesn't mind catering to the kind of people they'd become- refugees, enemies of Zahard, defectors from God's temple- it's a terrible place to keep a child, Arkraptor knows, but they don't really have much of a choice, given the circumstances.

Miseng has finally fallen asleep, is curled up exhausted on the opposite bed, hands wrapped up in the stingy sheets, tight enough she'll have crease-marks all over her hands in the morning, it's the little things like that where she looks just like his daughter it makes his throat ache. The same tender little motions, the same vulnerable expressions. The way she'd thrown her arms around his legs, lips trembling on the verge of tears, so thin he could feel her rib cage expanding under her skin like unfurling wings, and it'd all come crashing back to him, everything he'd lost the right to.

_You can't have everything_, was his wife's favorite phrase, hurled at him like so many broken dishes and ruined dinners, bright and hard like the little shards of glass flecked across the living room floor, gleaming in the carpet. After a time they'd both stopped bothering to pick them up, and they scattered god knows where, ended up in random places in random rooms. The shards burrowed maliciously through socks, dug into his soles pulled up little teardrops of blood as if he had been walking on needles. He took to wearing shoes indoors, the occasional fragile crunching sound as if something precious had been crushed, although it'd stopped bothering him as he'd spent less and less time at home, the child-sized hole between them a black hole in reverse, repelling him and pushing their orbits farther and farther apart into the empty frontier.

_You can't have everything._ Arkraptor knows, like the sticky-fingered monkey grabbing at fruit, if he doesn't pick what he wants now he'll come home with nothing, just sore shoulders and a long long road littered with discarded things. Broken things scattered on the ground glittering like fallen stars. So. He picked.

Tomorrow he'll rifle through his contacts, get them out of this level. They'll have to lay low for a while, but it's much easier to hide two people than of a whole team of people. Maybe it'll take a while, but he'll find themselves someplace safe, far away from it all- just him and her and all the things he'd thrown away.

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End file.
